Cultivating Emotional Detachment

Do you ever find yourself acting like an emotional vacuum cleaner, swooping into the corners of other people's pain and sucking it up as if it were your own? Although we may think that this is the loving thing to do, it's not. It is important that we emphasize - understand and comprehend another's feelings - but it is equally important that we try not to sympathize - allow other's feelings to affect us in a similar fashion. Sympathizing does not eliminate the other person's distress and it renders us less capable of being supportive, because we become swept away by our own feelings instead of able to concentrate on their experience.

An effective way to support others who are in pain is to cultivate compassionate detachment. Compassionate detachment asks that we feel deeply for another person, and understand the extent of her pain, without immersing ourselves in it or assuming responsibility to solve it or make it better. Compassionately paying attention to someone's distress is more constructive than attempting to fix it. Each person must find his or her own solutions, but being supported and encouraged along the way is a wonderful gift.


Compassionate detachment frees us from "sympathy pains" and allows us to be truly involved with others by providing empathetic comfort, encouragement, and support.